iuliae: 2D Art Thread

Hi everyone! My name is Giulia, I started a few years ago as a 3D artist but decided to switch to 2D since I wanted to focus more on the pre-production and initial creative process.

My objective is to work in the videogame industry and my dream would be as a creative director, since I love to design stories and characters and basically I'd love to see my ideas take form as videogames!

I understand it's a bit farfetched and I'm not sure how to proceed, so right now I'm studying by my own digital painting and trying to push in a character design and concept art direction.

Calling it done. It took much more time than expected and there're lot of things I'm not happy with. I always end up with a realistic shading and I feel like it clashes with my lineart. I was thinking about doing some studies from photo to learn to convey my style better.

I've always wanted to copy some of my favorite classical statues, so since I'm in value study mode I thought I could make a series or something like that. There's always a lot to learn Ratto di Proserpina by Bernini, wip.

Posting my progress since for a few days I'll be away from my pc and unable to continue. I'm already around 5 hours in... I thought there wouldn't be something worse than the lion mane, but her hair definitely is. I tried to keep it more loose at the beginning but ended up going too literal again. Hope I'll able to be more quick with time and practice.

As promised here are the references I've collected this far for this work:

I wanted to do something splash art-like with Poloma Halloween's skin. These are some thumbnails:

What do you guys think? Personally during the process I was already thinking about going with the 3rd, but I must admit that now I prefer the 1st pose. 4th is really Halloweenian too so right now I'm thinking 1 or 4.

I decided to go with the 4th, so I could do something funny which also really relate to the Halloween theme. My progress so far:

Tomorrow I plan to finish the base drawing and setting the mood, possibly start painting too. I want to add some references to the other heroes inside the cauldron, maybe avoiding to make it look like she cooked them (even if a friend told me he would dig that lol).

Pose exploration for another one. I'll probably do this and another one and then close this project.

I think I finally settled for the last one (5), I'll fix it a bit tomorrow and it should be ready to go
This one was particularly tricky because the long dress will be
semi-trasparent, so I wanted to show it without getting too confusionary
and without using a standing pose which is a format that doesn't work
well with the other pastel girls.

In these days I've also done an art test for a mobile game company, I
didn't sign any NDA and it didn't involve anything company-related, so
it should be safe to share here! I'll wait for the reply and then post
it

Before I forget, this is the character I designed for the art test!
The request was a military strategy mobile game set in a near future
setting, so I thought of a squad commander, a tactical support unit with
extremely high strategical skills operating real time on the field
through an advanced communication system. It all took no more than 10
hours

Profile art and top-down in battle views:

A bit of exploration:

Thinking of fixing up a bit the top-down view and then I'll probably add it to my portfolio